Where do you do you find Quality Direct Mail Lists?

I have been selling home business opportunity leads for nearly four years. It is a huge and rapidly growing market especially during this economy turndown. We generate over 30,000 leads daily from online and offline marketing and surveys. They include email and mailing addresses, and you may also order leads with telephone numbers. Leads are never sold more than twice. See my sig.

I ran a direct mail business in the UK for a long time and learned from experience to be careful with lists. The absolute best list was my own customers of course.

What I found was not to trust claims of large amounts of fresh lists and to test mail lists for response before using all of the names. The worst list I ever bought produced a 13% goneaway rate, which told me that no way was it a fresh list.

For home business the best suppliers were home business magazines, though they didn't come in large amounts. I also bought larger amounts from companies who advertised in the nationals but before I bought I spoke to the owners and asked them where and what they advertised. Before buying I checked the adverts and didn't buy from those who advertised work from home, only those who advertised home businesses. That is because I found the response rate from work at home leads abysmal.

I kept records of who I had mailed to avoid too much duplicate mailing and to learn which lists were best. Time consuming but worth it because my response rates were usually higher than average, so I made more money with less mail.

Eventually I had about 8 regular trusted suppliers who were honest with me and didn't try to pad out lists with old names. I alternated between them and occasionally tried out new suppliers.

Apart from mailing out myself I used print and mail companies and advertising to get fresh leads.

I have been very successful with Direct Mail here in the UK.

The first thing to realize, is that 99.99% of mailing lists are scams.

The claims about the data is nearly always fraudulent/bogus.

The key is to ALWAYS have a guilty until proven innocent mentality when it comes to dealing with lists, list brokers etc.

Always have the mindset that a list is probably fraudulent until you have seen real proof/evidence showing otherwise.

Even if you are using a big list broker, they pull scams just as often if not more - they will dilute lists with rubbish names etc and use all sorts of tricks - I've seen it all believe me.

The good news is once you have found a decent/honest source of lists for your market, they can be a licence to print money if you have an offer which converts, your only limit is the amount of names available.

One of the most important things with lists is to ask the source difficult questions, and to do your own due diligence.

Let us say a list claims to have 20,000 online buyers of a marketing book for example, and the 20,000 addresses are available for rental.

The first thing I would do is check the Alexa Rankings of the website, very often it becomes obvious it is a lie because the website doesn't get anywhere near enough traffic to have that many buyers.

The second thing you can do is ASK FOR PROOF they actually made the sales.

How long does it take for a genuine list owner to make a quick 2-3 minute video of them logging into their merchant account showing all the buyers they have from the sales dashboard?

Someone with a genuine list won't hesitate to provide proof, because they will have nothing to hide.

If they don't, there is a 99% chance it is a fraudulent list.

If they do provide proof, you may be onto a winner.

In other words the only way to get the best lists, is to be pretty ruthless about your questions, due diligence - you have to go over the top.

When I've made serious money with lists it has ALWAYS been when I've demanded real proof that the list is genuine.

Obviously the other way to do it, and better way is to do it the same way it is now done online - Joint Ventures.

You promote their product to your list, and vice versa.

Jay Abraham calls it endorsed mailings, it is very powerful.

But if you don't have a list yourself, the only way to do it is the way I have mentioned otherwise you will be eaten alive in this business.